An interesting new study by three key authors, Abhay Aneja, Jacob M. Grumbach and Abby K. Wood, discusses the ever burning issue of money in US electoral politics. The authors focus on financial inclusion in politics specifically as concerns campaign finance. Here is an excerpt:

Our deregulated campaign finance system has a race problem. We use innovations in statistical methods and the universe of campaign contributions for federal elections to analyze the racial distribution of money in American politics between 1980 and 2012. We find that white people are severely overrepresented among donors. A stunning 91% of money contributed to state and federal candidates by individuals has come from non-Hispanic white donors. The racial gap in campaign contributions is significantly greater than the gap in voter participation and elected office holding. It is also relatively constant across time and elected offices.

Read the full abstract for the draft paper here.